Athletes and Drugs

I wrote a letter to the president regarding the issue of athletes and drugs

Dear President ,

Olympians have been caught with performance enhancing drugs, they should face consequences such as being banned from competing in the olympics. If an olympian is caught with drugs they automatically get disqualified. Other consequences include forfeiture of any medals, points and prizes. There were a total of 127 doping cases from 1968-2010 in the olympics.

The reason people do this is because it is a quick and easy way to increase your athletic performance without working for it, the consequences are not severe enough because it is not stopping people from taking these drugs. This affects the athletes because these drugs are bad for their bodies. The USADA(the National Anti-doping Association) says that some effects of these drugs are liver damage, heart attacks, Loss of vision, and can include death in some cases. This also affects the teammates of the athletes because if one person gets caught they could also get their whole team to lose their medals or get disqualified. The coaches time would also be wasted if they trained long and hard with the athletes and end up not being able to compete. This also affects the people watching who wanted to watch them compete, and it can influence younger people to do drugs which is very bad for them. Some people may argue that using these drugs should be your decision because you know the consequences and that it’s your own choice whether to do this or not. That is like saying even though something is wrong you should still do it because you know what the consequences are.

What can be done to prevent this is making the ramifications worse by banning them from ever competing in the olympics. As of now athletes don’t get banned forever from competing in the olympics. The government should do this because it would give the athletes a reason to not do the drugs. From this I conclude that athletes should have worse consequences like never being able to compete again so they don’t do drugs.

#2nextprez

Letters to the Next President 2.0 engaged and connected young people, aged 13-18, as they researched, wrote, and made media to voice their opinions on issues that mattered to them in the 2016 Presidential Election.

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